Clear out the Congress cabal, says JNU professor Aditya Mukherjee

The tallest Congress leaders, including Nehru and Bose, had to be elected to various positions, often with a tough fight. Not any more.

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Aditya Mukherjee

New DelhiMay 23, 2014

ISSUE DATE: June 2, 2014

UPDATED: May 23, 2014 20:32 IST

Indira Gandhi, PV Narasimha Rao and Pranab Mukherjee at the AICC session in Calcutta on December 28, 1983.

Indira Gandhi, PV Narasimha Rao and Pranab Mukherjee at the AICC session in Calcutta on December 28, 1983

The massive defeat faced by the Congress in the 2014 elections is perhaps the deepest crisis ever faced by the 129-year-old party and the biggest challenge to the legacy it was supposed to be the torch-bearer of. The vision and legacy of the Indian freedom struggle, the very idea of India that Rabindranath Tagore first talked of, is under threat.

It is not only that the Congress is vanquished, but the nature of the victor is of extreme significance. The forces led by RSS had nothing to do with the Indian national movement. RSS had asked its cadres to stay away even from the biggest and the final surge of the Indian freedom struggle, the Quit India Movement, and asked them to preserve their energies for the 'real' battle that was to ensue, that against the Muslims. These forces were also responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, making the first home minister of independent India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, ban RSS and put 25,000 of its activists in jail.

It is these very forces that have come to power in India with a huge majority in the Lok Sabha. Does this mean that the battle for the idea of India as imagined by our nationalist leaders is lost? Less than a third of the electorate (about 31 per cent) voted for BJP, even though they got a sweeping majority of the seats due to the first-past-the-post electoral system, a system that is crying out for reform. But will the Congress be able to use the potential among the huge reserve of people who did not vote for BJP's sectarian, right-wing agenda to reverse the current situation?

Divide and rule

The answer to this question will depend on to what extent Congress correctly understands why the party has reached such an unprecedented low and why BJP was able to steal a march over it in such a big way. It will also depend on how seriously Congress takes on this huge challenge by chalking out a clear strategy for the future. We can start with a clue given by the veteran BJP leader L.K. Advani, who explained the current victory of BJP as a result of the bad governance of Congress (kusashan), their failure to curb inflation, and Narendra Modi's successful utilisation of the situation through his great "event management" skills (Advani's words), presumably in that order.

To this one may add a list of other factors, which explain the Congress's defeat and BJP's surge. First, a calibrated polarisation created by BJP to consolidate the Hindu vote in large areas such as UP, West Bengal, Assam and Gujarat. Second, a successful selling of a right-wing economic agenda to the Indian corporates in such a manner that they, for the first time in Indian history, almost unanimously decided to put their weight behind a divisive communal formation to back Modi, somewhat in the manner that the German bourgeoisie backed Adolf Hitler's rise to power, as an answer to their dreams, unhampered by environmental or social democratic concerns of the millions of Indian poor. The recent Land Acquisition Bill, coming on top of the series of rights-based legislations passed by the Congress, was the last straw for the corporates. Manmohan Singh, the blue-eyed boy of the corporates for more than two decades, was now suddenly totally unacceptable, as he was seen as incapable of seeing the corporates through numerous scams and attempts at the misappropriation of the country's natural resources.

Rahul, Sonia, Rajiv and Priyanka Gandhi

Third, the Congress on its part ran a listless, leaderless, inept election campaign. In large parts of the country they were not even seen as putting up a fight, including in strong Congress states like Rajasthan. One must remember that wherever a spirited fight was put up by regional parties, the Modi tsunami became a measly trickle, like in Odisha, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Telangana. Even the Congress did not do so badly in states like Punjab, where they led from the front and were able to defeat a star BJP leader.

Fourth, the collapse of the partnership between the party and the government, which worked extremely well for UPA 1 and part of UPA 2, contributed to a complete absence of governance and even more to the perception of absence of governance in the last couple of years. A void seen as being created by a 'weak' or 'uncertain leadership', a void the 'strong', 'decisive', almost messianic Modi was destined to fill.

Last and perhaps the most important, the Congress failed to project boldly its success in achieving both growth and distribution in considerable measure. It was as if one section of the Congress (mainly associated with the prime minister) saw itself as responsible for growth and the other (mainly linked to Sonia Gandhi) for distribution, and both were keen to deny the success of the other. Having taken India on to a growth path unthinkable a few decades ago and having launched one of the largest anti-poverty programmes in the world aimed at providing employment and other rights to the poor, the Congress failed to take credit for either. Who would believe that this was the party which guided India into the globalisation process without surrendering its sovereignty and insisting on a safety net for the poor, a task few other countries in a similar position could accomplish with as much success.

What, then, does the Congress need to do in the future? First, it must throw up a strong committed political leadership, which understands and is deeply steeped in the Congress ideology and which is there for the long haul. Reluctant leaders advised by essentially a non-political cabal, who often end up advising the Congress to play other people's politics, be it pandering to soft Hindutva in the name of not hurting majority sentiments or giving in to minority communalism and various shades of casteism in the name of uplifting the underprivileged, will no longer do. When it does so, the casteists and communalists run away with the sectional votes (Mayawati, Mulayam Singh and BJP). And more important, it allows Modi to take advantage of the inevitable massive backlash, and offer equal treatment to all citizens of this country. The Congress must remember its own slogan of Indira Gandhi days, 'Na jat par, na pat par, Indira ji ki bat par, mohar lagegi hath par (Vote not for caste or community but for the party)'. The Congress needs to stay its course on a left-of-centre, staunchly secular, inclusive path (without pandering to minority communalism or casteism), a path that had been the core USP of the party for over a century.

Second, and more important, the Congress has to take forward on a war footing the task of restoring to it its democratic character as envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi when he reorganised the party in 1920, and as it was practised from then till the 1960s. Rajiv Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi repeatedly talked about this being the way for the party to 'open up', establish contact with the grassroots, bypassing the 'power brokers'. They even took some Lilliputian steps towards it, but were drowned out in the immediate concerns of ruling the country.

Now is the opportunity to make this the central issue. Let us not forget that the forces the Congress itself has unleashed through the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution have now created an army of over three million elected representatives in various tiers of the Panchayati Raj institutions. It is this energy at the grassroots that has to be tapped for deepening our democracy. Let the Congress once again carry out massive membership drives and let its members elect its office-bearers from the village to the taluka to the district, provincial and national level, including AICC and the Working Committee and president of the party. The tallest leaders of the Congress, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, had to be elected to various positions, often with a tough fight. There will of course be teething problems such as bogus membership, but let the Congress take up the challenge, rope in stalwarts like J.M. Lyngdoh, and ensure a clean election process in the party. Surely, in this day and age, it is not an insurmountable problem. If the Congress succeeds in the task, it will once again be the only party in India with internal democracy. It will blaze a new trail for the whole country to emulate. If the current party leaderhip can materialise this vision which it has itself put forward so many times, then all criticism of it having a dynastic leadership, of it having closed doors for the non-privileged, of it having no connect with the people, of it being surrounded by sycophants who owe their positions only to proximity to the leadership rather than any proven grassroots work, will just wane away.

The Congress once again needs to become a party with a cause, a vision for which one has to struggle and be vigilant, and not a party that knows only how to wield power and distribute patronage, as it increasingly is tending to become. In this effort, the party must have the humility to work with and wholeheartedly support large number of individuals, groups, and organisations that share with it the idea of India as envisioned by the stalwarts of the freedom struggle.